capable of that; but the boy, growing more serious, and to
prove he hadn't meant what he said, not only hurried him off to the
Consulate--since he was to start that evening, as he had wired to his
friend--but made sure of their affair by going with him. They splashed
through the tortuous perforations and over the humpbacked bridges, and
they passed through the Piazza, where they saw Mr. Moreen and Ulick go
into a jeweller's shop. The Consul proved accommodating--Pemberton said
it wasn't the letter, but Morgan's grand air--and on their way back they
went into Saint Mark's for a hushed ten minutes. Later they took up and
kept up the fun of it to the very end; and it seemed to Pemberton a part
of that fun that Mrs. Moreen, who was very angry when he had announced
her his intention, should charge him, grotesquely and vulgarly and in
reference to the loan she had vainly endeavoured to effect, with bolting
lest they should "get something out" of him. On the other hand he had to
do Mr. Moreen and Ulick the justice to recognise that when on coming in
they heard the cruel news they took it like perfect men of the world.

CHAPTER VIII

When he got at work with the opulent youth, who was to be taken in hand
for Balliol, he found himself unable to say if this aspirant had really
such poor parts or if the appearance were only begotten of his own long
association with an intensely living little mind. From Morgan he heard
half a dozen times: the boy wrote charming young letters, a patchwork of
tongues, with indulgent postscripts in the family Volapuk and, in little
squares and rounds and crannies of the text, the drollest
illustrations--letters that he was divided between the impulse to show
his present charge as a vain, a wasted incentive, and the sense of
something in them that publicity would profane. The opulent youth went
up in due course and failed to pass; but it seemed to add to the
presumption that brilliancy was not expected of him all at once that his
parents, condoning the lapse, which they good-naturedly treated as little
as possible as if it were Pemberton's, should have sounded the rally
again, begged the young coach to renew the siege.

The young coach was now in a position to lend Mrs. Moreen three louis,
and he sent her a post-office order even for a larger amount. In return
for this favour he received a frantic scribbled line from her: "Implore
you to come back instantly--Morgan dread fully ill." T